With the development of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) industry, a large amount of Chinese herb residues is generated by hospitals, Chinese medicine enterprises and health care enterprises every year. Counting roughly, the annual production amount of Chinese herb residues in China is up to more than 30 million tons. At present, the Chinese herb residues from most enterprises are disposed by ways of landfill, incineration, even using for feeds and composts, etc. Landfill, incineration and the like potentially harm the environment, also waste the herb residues resource. The range of herb residues which can be used for feed supplements is relatively narrow and the usage is also quite small; also the herb residues composting cycle is relatively long, the disposing capacity is relatively low.
There are still lots of meaningful research on the resource utilization of Chinese herb residues, for example using for cultivation substrate of edible fungus, etc.; for preparation of bio-ethanol and biogas by fermentation; for disposing wastewater and preparing biochar, etc. Chinese herb residues have a broad source and a large variety, the production quantity is large amount. However, these disposing methods have low demand for herb residues, certain limits to the type of herb residues, and no advantage on cost. Hence, it is hard to consume the large amount of herb residues on a large scale.
China has a large pulping and papermaking industry, paper and cardboard production per year is up to 100 million tons, however, the raw materials for pulp and paper in China are heavily dependent on imports. According to statistics, in China, the amount of imported paper pulp used for papermaking was up to 16.85 million tons and the amount of imported waste paper up to 29.24 million tons in 2013. As China's unique plant fiber waste, Chinese herb residue is a usable raw material for papermaking, the main components are cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin. However, since Chinese herb residue is the residue of herbaceous plants after water or organic solvent extraction, it has many shortcomings compared with traditional papermaking raw materials, such as too short fiber length, too many impurities, too much pigment, etc. So Chinese herb residue is not an ideal papermaking raw material.
Molded pulp article uses paper pulp as raw material, some chemicals are added, the paper article is molded into certain shapes on a molding machine with special molds. It can be used as food boxes, tableware, packing linings and industrial cushioning packaging materials. Due to its good buffer protection performance and environmental friendly characteristic, the development of pulp molded article is very rapid. However, there is little research on how to prepare Chinese herb residue into qualified molded articles.
At present, a large amount of herb residues is generated from the preparation process of Chinese medicine, such as Ganodermae, Glycyrrhizae Radix et Rhizoma, Astragalus membranaceus (Fisch.) Bunge, Angelicae Sinensis Radix, Leonuri Herba, Morindae Officinalis Radix, Salviae Miltiorrhizae Radix, Panacis Quinquefolii Radix, etc. Research and development of a waste recourses cyclic utilization method using Chinese herb residue becomes an inevitable trend of technological development.